Multi-view scans alignment for 3D spherical mosaicing in large-scale unstructured environments

We are currently developing a vision-based system aiming to perform a fully automatic pipeline for in situ photorealistic three-dimensional (3D) modeling of previously unknown, complex and unstructured underground environments. Since in such environments navigation sensors are not reliable, our system embeds only passive (camera) and active (laser) 3D vision senors. Laser Range Finders are particularly well suited for generating dense 3D maps by aligning multiples scans acquired from different viewpoints. Nevertheless, nowadays Iteratively Closest Point (ICP)-based scan matching techniques rely on heavy human operator intervention during a post-processing step. Since a human operator cannot access the site, these techniques are not suitable in high-risk underground environments. This paper presents an automatic on-line scan matcher able to cope with the nowadays 3D laser scanners’ architecture and to process either intensity or depth data to align scans, providing robustness with respect to the capture device. The proposed implementation emphasizes the portability of our algorithm on either single or multi-core embedded platforms for on-line mosaicing onboard 3D scanning devices. The proposed approach addresses key issues for in situ 3D modeling in difficult-to-access and unstructured environments and solves for the 3D scan matching problem within an environment-independent solution. Several tests performed in two prehistoric caves illustrate the reliability of the proposed method.